Shaleen Baral

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on the atlas · 57

highlights · 182

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theatre meaning: when it becomes a social act. — Orson Welles, 1938
Fill in the Blanks | Jonathan Rosenbaum
Yet Smith Galer, citing the linguists Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson, suggests that linguicide might refer not just to the “outright killing of a language” but also to “letting a language die, or not supporting its coexistence”—which amounts to “covert language murder.”
Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die | The New Yorker
It reminds me that, however contused by the contemporary moment, this place we share remains a kind of living astonishment, maybe not itself indestructible but built up around human impulses and aspirations whose tensile strength you would be very, very foolish to underestimate.
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
It’s just this: whatever its other graces, serious work in English prepares its participants, as I think almost nothing else can, for the perplexities, anguishes, and errant joys of being alive in the world. What does work in the humanities testify to, if not the painful wonder of being a person, being human, among other persons?
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
The work we do can help you speak up, not just for the utility of all those practical aptitudes, but for the concatenated values they incubate—the sorts of conscience-prickling discernments that might allow you to mark the crucial differences between “success” and, say, acquisition, between “innovation” and mere destructiveness, or between “freedom” and the latitude to exploit.
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
have often benefited from such an education themselves and are happy to provide it for their own children—including at elite Ivy League schools that do not even have the kind of vocational programs that they recommend so fervently for everyone else
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
You will in all cases know what it is to feel something cherished wrenched and jolted into something less, and then less, and then less.
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
The expressed conviction that the greatest goods of civic life belong by right to the winning classes, and to everyone else go the knockoff approximations, actually precedes our present-day authoritarian vandals by decades.
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
If the task at my old job was, as we used to joke, to paint a thin veneer of culture on tomorrow’s ruling classes, here it is to catapult kids into, or at least nearer to the frayed edges of, the middle class—and to do so at enormous, city-serving scale, and at a cost liable to make prestige private institutions gawp and blush.
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
Every last thing we do here, I say, rests upon the conviction that our job is to bring the highest-caliber literary education imaginable—comprising the best of what has been said and written and argued—to a student body selected with as little regard for the distinctions of status, wealth, background, color, and need as can be found at any major institution of higher learning.
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
Speaking for myself, I can say that if I never again read a glossy feature about the dining options at the private colleges of New England, or about what is and is not being taught at Harvard, or really about any of the other dilemmas proper to institutions whose clientele is drawn so massively from the planetary overclass, I won’t be mad about it.
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
The story of the decimation of higher education over the past decades is well-told, as is the inset story of the decimation of the humanities. A massive contraction in state and federal funds, accelerated by the cascading disasters of 2008; a tech-inflected drive toward evermore foggy conceptions of “innovation,” keyed toward STEM fields in their most “disruptive” modes; a vast retrenchment, rationalized now as fiduciary responsibility and technocratic rightsizing, now as rebuke to a plague of alleged “wokeness,” and all of it part of the calculated annihilation of any value conceivably public…
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
Efficiency in the name of someone else’s profit, a quasi-robotic optimization, a disciplined adherence to the way things are done—who wants to celebrate such things?
Memos of Blood and Fire | Online Only | n+1 | Peter Coviello
a preposterously rich school, beloved by and to the planetary ruling classes, and they’ll be fine. Shed no tears for the place, or for what is functionally a bit of prestige-media advertising, unlikely even in its most churlish moments to discourage any of its chosen demographic from applying
Literary Hub » Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
most all of it on the grounds of being a bathetically unscholarly corporate-sponsored piece of risible chaff
Literary Hub » Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
And so, after consulting with friends a little more media-seasoned than I, and exchanging some emails with the reporter laying out what I was and wasn’t interested in speaking about, I agreed to an interview. I did this because, in ways you might think I’d have outgrown by now, I’m a fucking idiot.
Literary Hub » Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
UK Statistics Authority
Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin · ‘This looks absolutely rubbish’: Palantir and the NHS
Arendt distinguishes between the human capacity to begin, to take initiative, and what it means for those initiatives to become real, to arrive in the world.
Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited - Biesta - 2020 - Educational Theory - Wiley Online Library
We live, in other words, in a real world, not a fantasy (and this real world includes “our” body as well). We encounter this reality when our initiatives meet resistance — first of all, the resistance of the material world but also, of course, the resistance of the social world, the resistance of other human beings who, if they take up our beginnings at all, may do so in very different and unexpected ways.
Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited - Biesta - 2020 - Educational Theory - Wiley Online Library
What counted as knowledge involves “a framework of assumptions which we know only to be relatively valid”; but it retained a “universal” validity, through its being the present point reached in a dialogue intended to reach consensus
Does Higher Education have Aims?
“Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit.”
Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited - Biesta - 2020 - Educational Theory - Wiley Online Library
that of how education can help children and young people to obtain “sovereignty” in light of the societal and natural forces they are subjected to
Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited - Biesta - 2020 - Educational Theory - Wiley Online Library
“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited - Biesta - 2020 - Educational Theory - Wiley Online Library
Freedom viewed in this way is fundamentally an existential matter; it is about how we exist, how we lead our own lives, which of course no one else can do for us.13 Put differently, freedom is a first-person matter. It is about how I exist as the subject of my own life, not as the object of what other people want from me
Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited - Biesta - 2020 - Educational Theory - Wiley Online Library
what is at stake in the idea of subjectification is our freedom as human beings and, more specifically, our freedom to act or to refrain from action
Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited - Biesta - 2020 - Educational Theory - Wiley Online Library
there is always also socialization going on — the (re)presentation of cultures, traditions, and practices
Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited - Biesta - 2020 - Educational Theory - Wiley Online Library
the simplest provision of knowledge and skills already provides a certain way of (re)presenting the world and presenting what is considered to be of value.
Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited - Biesta - 2020 - Educational Theory - Wiley Online Library
One important aspect of my critique of the rise of the “new language of learning” and the more general “learnification” of education had to do with the fact that the term “learning” is a rather empty process-term that doesn't say much — if anything at all — about what the learning is supposed to be about and for. Yet these questions are crucial for education, because the point of education is never that students simply learn — they can do that anywhere, including, nowadays, on the Internet — but that they learn something, that they learn it for a reason, and that they learn it from someone. A …
Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited - Biesta - 2020 - Educational Theory - Wiley Online Library
It doesn't matter that it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other file that you could get from a random number generator. It happens that you didn't get it from a random number generator. You got it from copyrighted material; it is copyrighted. The randomly-generated file, even if bit-for-bit identical, would have a different Colour. The Colour inherits through all scrambling and descrambling operations and you're distributing a copyrighted work, you Commie Mutant Traitor.
What Colour are your bits? - Ansuz - mskala's home page
It makes perfect sense to a lawyer that where the information came from is important, in fact maybe more important than the information itself. The law sees Colour.
What Colour are your bits? - Ansuz - mskala's home page
Who created the bits? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Are they copies of other bits? Those questions are perhaps answerable by "metadata", but metadata suggests to me additional bits attached to the bits in question, and I'd like to emphasize that I'm talking here about something that is not properly captured by bits at all and actually cannot be, ever. Let's call it "Colour", because it turns out to behave a lot like the colour-coded security clearances of the Paranoia universe.
What Colour are your bits? - Ansuz - mskala's home page
Whether such a rejection is reasonable depends roughly on a comparison between the burdens that the principle imposes on the rejector and the benefits it provides to other individuals, taken one at a time.
Thomas Nagel · I’m not sorry: Should we punish?
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
This is Water - Alumni Bulletin - Kenyon College
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.
This is Water - Alumni Bulletin - Kenyon College
And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.
This is Water - Alumni Bulletin - Kenyon College
When we notice our attention being diverted away from the man behind the curtain, we should get our eyes back on the boss. We should start demanding to see their chat histories, and where we win that right, figure out how to replicate it in other workplaces. That’s where the fourth industrial revolution that the local government dorks in central New York have been talking about for the past decade will be won or lost.
Blunt thoughts on AI | Issue 53 | n+1
the object of mathematics is the honor of the human spirit
The fall of the theorem economy - David Bessis
The problems of truth and meaning are not technical issues in some recondite branch of logic or set theory. They confront anyone who uses or teaches mathematics. If we wish, we can ignore them... It would be surprising if this had no practical consequences.
The fall of the theorem economy - David Bessis
These will be difficult years for mathematicians. Students will desert. Money will dry up. Postdocs will ask pressing questions and senior faculty will have to come up with answers. At parties, people will start giving them weird looks, as if they had become living fossils.
The fall of the theorem economy - David Bessis
He presented mathematics as a low-hanging fruit, a “particularly easy” terrain for AI, because it is “a closed system with rules,” “like Go and Chess.” Yet Go and Chess aren’t ordinary closed systems. They are actual games with winners and losers. Even more so, they are finite two-person games with perfect information and, by a 1913 theorem of Zermelo, they admit optimal strategies.9
The fall of the theorem economy - David Bessis
But we will find that that actually wasn’t the most important part of what we do.
The fall of the theorem economy - David Bessis
The mystery is this: a human with these capabilities would, almost certainly, be proving amazing theorems constantly. Why haven’t we seen this from the models yet? What are they missing?
The fall of the theorem economy - David Bessis
It is that it is literally meaningless, in the sense that it doesn’t compile on the only hardware that is currently able to make sense of it and appreciate its value—the human brain.
The fall of the theorem economy - David Bessis
Although, to be honest, there never was much suspense—the barbarians won, because there were barbarians on both sides.
The fall of the theorem economy - David Bessis
“I like mine better, because it’s original and I worked really hard on it,” she said. “I like mine better because it didn’t take thirty seconds.”
What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools? | The New Yorker
This Wallace quotation was reposted more than 2,000 times on X, and received more than 15,000 likes. “[H]oly shit, you founded Replika and you’re saying this??” one X user asked. “What kind of cognitive dissonance level are you on??” “Very high,” Kuyda replied.
‘Infinite Jest,’ the Internet, and the Politics of Reading | Los Angeles Review of Books
the archived “souls” of long-defunct computers on a PC called thoth, for the Egyptian god who records the weighing of hearts on the journey to the afterlife
When Your Digital Life Vanishes | The New Yorker
the movement’s demographics—75% white, 68.8% male, and 30% from an elite college.
Saving Everyone, Everywhere, Across Space and Time - 34th Street Magazine
Alice recounts, “He brought it up as an example to say that the biological differences between men and women may account for why men are more likely to succeed in logic or rational–based activities and succeed in EA spaces.”
Saving Everyone, Everywhere, Across Space and Time - 34th Street Magazine
While the stated goal of the EA club was simply to introduce students to these ideas, it was hard to do so without “making a normative claim” that you ought to “make career choices that align with these beliefs.”
Saving Everyone, Everywhere, Across Space and Time - 34th Street Magazine